*Call for Papers: Collected Volume of Essays on Early Modern Disability*

*Call for Papers: Collected Volume of Essays on Early Modern Disability*

Abstract: 500 words (Due Date: April 1, 2010)

Editors: Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood

Accepted abstracts will lead to scholarly essays (c. 5,000-6,000 words)
to be included in a proposed book collection tentatively entitled
"Disabling the Renaissance: Recovering Early Modern Disability."

While Renaissance scholarship in the past few decades has been
interested in all sorts of new identity histories, too little work has
been undertaken on early modern disabled selves as such. Accordingly, we
are interested in essay submissions that call attention to how recent
conversation about difference in the early modern period has often
overlooked or misidentified disability. This volume will present early
modern disability studies as a productive theoretical lens that can
reanimate existing scholarly dialogue about Renaissance subjectivities
even as it motivates more politically invested classroom pedagogies.

Essays might address all sorts of disability representations in the
early modern period, and these representations need not be limited to
the British Isles and/or the Continent. Essays might investigate how
disability was imagined by Renaissance cultures, both real and
fictional, or expose how early modern conversation about the "able" body
constructed the disabled body as its oppositional term. Essays could
historicize that conversation by examining what disability "traditions"
early modern writers inherited from the classical and medieval eras and
what early modern views inform our contemporary understanding of
disability. These suggestions, however, merely offer a place to begin,
and in no way exhaust the kinds of topics this volume will explore.
Again, the goal of the volume is to reveal the utility of disability
studies to early modern scholarship while advocating that Renaissance
cultural representations of non-standard bodies and minds might provide
new models for theorizing disability that are simultaneously more
inclusive and specific than those currently available. **

No later than April 1, 2010, please email abstracts to:
ahobgood@willamette.edu <mailto:ahobgood@willamette.edu> and
dwood@nmu.edu <mailto:dwood@nmu.edu>.